


And Remember What You Were Before

by Page161of180



Series: You're a Story universe [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Also postlude to a Fix-It, Fix-It, M/M, Prelude to a Fix-It, Well - Freeform, post 4x13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-24 14:38:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20360179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Page161of180/pseuds/Page161of180
Summary: “Minor mendings-- it’s not intended to work on living things,” she’s saying. “There can be-- side effects--”“-- thinks I’m dead, Alice. What the hell kind of side effect--”“--what you told me? When I asked what it feels like for you, when you cast it? You said you felt like you helped it wake up and remember--”“--and remember what it was-- oh, Jesus--”A spell gone awry gives a grieving Eliot an unknowing glimpse of his (and Quentin's) future.Now, with epilogue.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This little idea has been banging around in my head for a while now, and I felt the time had come to write it out. In my head, this story occurs about 48 hours before the events of an accidental fix-it I wrote called "You're a Story (I Can Follow)." But essentially, you can imagine inserting this piece before the start of the fix-it of your choice. 
> 
> Be warned that the Eliot we see here is in mourning and not taking anything like good care of himself. He doesn't know yet, poor lamb, that brighter days are just over the horizon. But-- oh, they are.

When Eliot fell asleep-- or maybe ‘fell unconscious’ is more accurate-- he’d been in Fillory, underneath a pile of Quentin’s old, barely worn shirts, praying indiscriminately to the god his mother always insisted had died for him, and the god(s) that had literally died _ because _ of him, for-- something. Anything. For just-- not _ this _.

Physically, that’s where he’d been, anyway.

Mentally, spiritually, all those other states that he’d been doing his damnedest to not experience anymore, he’d been indulging in the same dead, doomed fantasies he’s been pretending not to harbor for the past two weeks (_ 12 days, 17 hours, 46 minutes, 0 heartbeats _). 

That dichotomy between the physical and the mental, the real and the _ please please please _, is probably why it doesn’t shock Eliot, terribly, to wake up in Quentin’s arms, to brown eyes that are wide and worried, and strong, shaky fingers against his throat scrabbling for his pulse. 

He’d just passed out where _ he _ lives and woken up in the dreams where his heart lives-- again. Happens all the time.

What else is the vodka fucking_ for _?

Eliot slips back under fairly quickly this time-- which is disappointing, but not surprising. He might have gone _ too _ hard this time. The goal is always to get to the fuzzy, slippy, carried-by-the-current point of inebriation, where he can open his eyes in his dreams to see Quentin and feel like it’s normal, so he doesn’t have to waste the time soaking his tears into the canvas of Dream Quentin’s sneakers. But this time everything had been faster and fainter, like the current was flowing out of him and not around him. He’d barely had time to say to the Q in his mind, “ _ stop being dead, please, _” before the darkness pulled him under again.

Too much, too fast, maybe. 

Going back under helps, though. Lets whatever combination of chemicals had got him to jackpot this time diffuse, until everything feels warm and womb-like. It’s dark but there are voices, fading in and out. 

One is sharp and frustrated, so quietly furious that Eliot can practically see Alice’s jaw clenching. 

“-- just _ once _ you would _ think _instead of rushing in to--”

The other voice is Quentin. The Quentin that Eliot misses the most. Not the one Eliot usually finds in his head, who curls up sweet and whispers that he forgives him. The one who’s stubborn and pissy and can’t be moved, and had wanted, once, to be Eliot’s, anyway. 

“--was bleeding _ everywhere _, Alice-- did you want me to do? Let him--”

“--_ waited _for someone, but--”

“--for who? _ You _?--”

_ Oh, baby _ , Eliot thinks, in the easy, dream-logic way that means the alcohol is working just right. _ I always put a wedge between you two. I always ruin you. _

“-- get it, I fucked up. I panicked, and I didn’t-- Can you just--”

Eliot hears Alice sigh, then, the way she always did when she had to remind herself that she really did love Quentin, even though he made as much sense to her as the man in the goddamned moon. Eliot could never judge her for forgetting; he understands. How many times had _he_ had to remind himself that he _didn’t _love Quentin, after all? 

“Minor mendings-- it’s not intended to work on living things,” she’s saying. “There can be-- side effects--”

“-- thinks I’m _ dead _, Alice. What the hell kind of side effect--”

“--what you told me? When I asked what it feels like for you, when you cast it? You said you felt like you helped it wake up and remember--”

“--and remember what it was-- _ oh _, Jesus--” 

“--far as I can tell, you called forward one version of who Eliot used to-- ”

“--oh, God. Oh, _ God _\--”

_ Grab his shoulder _ , Eliot thinks loudly at Alice. _ Tell him he’s okay _.

Maybe she does. Maybe not. A weight sinks down on the mattress beside Eliot, and Eliot rolls toward it. Oh, Eliot’s on a mattress. That’s-- strange. Usually there’s no _ there _in these dreams, only Quentin. Just Quentin nowhere, which is the only place Quentin can be, now. 

“--going to be okay, Q-- I just need a little more research to pin down how to reverse it--”

Dream Quentin’s hand reaches for Eliot’s own while Alice keeps talking. _ Don’t let go this time, _ he thinks at himself. _ Don’t ever let him go _ . But his hand isn’t listening to him right now-- not anymore than his heart listened to him back _ then _. 

“-- the important thing is that you _ can’t tell him _, Q. I mean it. Knowing the future-- too dangerous-- could ruin everything--” 

_ You don’t have to worry so much, Alice _ , Eliot wants to tell her, as the words fade out and the quiet slips over Eliot’s head like a sweater, and the feeling of imaginary Quentin’s hand against him melts away. _ It’s ruined already. It’s all ruined already. _

The next time Eliot opens his eyes is the first time he realizes something is-- _ off _ , here. He would be inclined to say something is _ wrong _here, but-- well. He can’t say that.

Because Quentin is sitting beside him, watching his eyes flicker open. 

Eliot is used to dreaming Quentins by now-- in the endless fucking eons (_ 12 days, 17 hours, probably a few more minutes, 0 heartbeats _) that have passed since Eliot first opened his eyes in a world without the real Quentin in it. By now, it’s almost expected, waking-not waking with Quentin’s tongue in his mouth or Quentin’s head on his chest or Quentin’s slap on his jaw or Quentin’s hand in his hand or Quentin’s jumbled up, broken body clutched pathetically in Eliot’s arms. 

It’s never like this, though. In a place that feels specific and _ real _. There’s never a king-sized bed with a navy-on-navy striped duvet, or chic navy blue walls, or a shelf overstuffed with falling-apart books, or a windowsill with succulents in angular white and gold pots, or sunlight filtering through closed blinds, or the unmistakably Earthly sound of car horns coming from the street that Eliot can tell is a few stories below them.

There’s never the raw-nerve thumping behind Eliot’s eyes that speaks of being hungover, rather than still actively, hallucination-inducing drunk. 

There’s never _ Alice Quinn _ sitting on Eliot’s other side, glaring like the angel of death, sitting so close to the edge of the bed that no part of her tights touch the mattress, notwithstanding that her skirt is about as long as a postage stamp. 

“Hey, there,” Q says, soft and fond, from Eliot’s left. Eliot turns back to him, and sees that careful expression Q used to wear sometimes, the one that looked like he wanted to touch but was afraid that he’d break something if he even breathed too hard. His eyes are glued to Eliot’s face and his mouth is open just slightly, the corners lifting, his dimples just starting to show. It has all the hallmarks of a smile, but Eliot knows that just one finger against Quentin’s skin would shatter the illusion and free the whimper that Quentin’s throat is straining to keep in. 

“How are you feeling?” Q asks, after a tight and painful-looking swallow. 

Eliot watches his filmy eyes, then glances back to stone-faced Alice. 

“Am I-- dead?” he asks. 

If his voice cracks on the last word, it’s because he can see Margo’s hard-scoured expression, as she leaves her boyfriend to sleep alone, so that she can monitor Eliot’s shallow breathing in the night. Can hear her saying _ he died trying to save _ you, _ baby _ \-- the endearment as hard as a blow. _ Don’t you fucking _ dare _ make that for nothing _. 

Quentin shakes his head, reaching out like he might take Eliot’s hand, then stopping short, thinking better of it. “No, El. You’re-- you’re not dead.”

_ But you are _ , Eliot thinks automatically. _ Why aren’t you? _

The question makes Eliot’s heart rate-- which feels thready and uncertain as it is, the way it usually does after drinking himself into an altered state of existence-- begin to skip. 

“Are we in my head, then?” he asks. His voice sounds louder than it should be, the pitch too high and too uniform. “How is this happening?”

It’s not that he doesn’t want this to be real. It’s that it’s _ not _ real. It can’t be. And every second without an explanation for why Eliot is seeing what it looks like-- feels like-- smells like-- _ Quentin _ \-- is a second closer to the point where he’ll start letting himself _ hope _ . And he can’t-- he can’t do that. He can’t let himself believe that he’ll see Quentin again and get to _ tell _ him-- and _ hold _ him-- and _ beg _ him-- and-- then find out no, never, it’s never, it’s never. He can’t _ do _that twice.

Quentin looks over to Alice, eyes wide and lost, like he’s begging her for something. Her stern mask cracks just a little, like it usually does when Quentin really, truly needs it to, and she reaches forward to rest a slim, steady hand at the very edge of Eliot’s shoulder, which is going up and down too quickly with his unsteady breaths. 

“Eliot,” she says curtly. There’s no sentiment in her tone, and that makes it easier to focus on. “You’re in--”

She pauses just slightly, cuts her eyes over to Quentin, then says, “-- another timeline.” 

Eliot doesn’t flinch this time, when the hope he was pretending not to harbor dies. He’s getting much better at it. 

(He meant it when he said he can’t live through losing the hope of ever seeing Quentin-- _ his _ Quentin-- again _ twice _ . He can’t live through it twice, because he’s _ already _ lived through it a thousand times in twelve days. He lives through it every time he draws a motherfucking breath.)

Alice keeps explaining what happened in that sharp, clinical tone. Quentin fights shit way above his paygrade in this timeline, too, apparently. Battle magic was thrown, the Eliot of this world got hit, Quentin panicked and threw the first spell he thought of to heal him, and somehow ended up switching _ that _ Eliot and _ this _Eliot’s consciousnesses in the process.

Alice’s Most-Righteous-Electra face goes extra reproachful as she recites that part of the story, her lips pressing together stubbornly as she talks to Eliot but looks at Quentin. Quentin huffs and crosses his arms over his chest, and when he does, Eliot finally notices the plain gold band on his left hand. 

_ Oh _, he thinks. Of course. 

Eliot looks around the room with new eyes, then, as he mostly-listens to Alice hitting her groove on the magical-theory of it all. The space is a little chicer than he would have guessed Alice would decorate. He would have expected-- Jesus. He shudders to think. Lilly Pulitzer and Pollyanna prisms and porcelain ponies holding up stacks of obscure and dangerous books that rattle against their padlocks like something out of Harry Potter. But still waters, and all that. 

Or maybe, Eliot considers, appraising the attractive, geometric art deco print on the far wall, perhaps the Eliot of this world had helped them. God, wouldn’t that _ just _ be something Quentin would do-- ask the man who covets him ( _ in every timeline _ , Eliot knows, _ in every world _) for help choosing the sheets on his marital bed, and then wonder why his wife can hardly bear to sit on it.

Or maybe it’s just the passage of time, Eliot thinks, letting himself look at the soft lines around this Quentin’s eyes, that he’s been avoiding since he opened his own. They’ll-- they’ll go deeper in a few years, Eliot knows. If Quentin smiles enough in this timeline. 

“--just a few more things to gather from the Library, and then we’ll be ready to reverse the spell. Eliot? Eliot, are you listening to me?” 

Eliot pulls himself away from-- from Alice’s husband to pay attention to her. If she notices that his eyes are glassy from staring longingly at said husband’s wrinkles, she’s polite enough, or efficient enough, or both, to say nothing. 

She stands up, taking care not to jostle the bed. “I’ll give you two a minute while I get everything set up.”

She looks hard at Quentin for a moment, before saying, “Remember what I told you.”

Eliot frowns as he sees her hands against the smooth white surface of the door.

“Why doesn’t Alice wear a ring?” he asks once the door shuts behind her, before he can stop himself. Blame the hangover. Or the exoticism of being a tourist in a world so much like (nothing like _ nothing like nothing like _) his own. Or that he can’t think of a single other thing to say to the man who in another world is the love of Eliot’s life and who died before the lines around his eyes could become anymore than ideas and memories from a life that Eliot took out behind the shed and shot. 

“Um,” Quentin offers, sounding thrown. “I’m not sure? I don’t think she’s ever really been a big jewelry person.”

It takes great effort not to let himself look at this lovely, confused Quentin the way he _ needs _to. Not to let his eyes go soft and his mouth go affectionately despairing. 

Eliot looks down at Quentin’s hand against the navy blue bedspread, instead. 

“You wear one,” he says quietly, reaching his right hand forward just to tap it-- not touching any skin, only the body-warm metal. 

Eliot wonders if this band settles this Quentin, gives him weight and security, the way that the little beaten copper thing that Arielle had chosen had settled his Quentin, once upon a time. He hopes it does.

Quentin doesn’t say anything for a moment, then suddenly he sighs-- loud, like he wants Eliot to hear it.

When Eliot dares to look up into this Quentin’s eyes, it feels-- oh _ fuck _ , oh _ God _, it feels so much like his Q again. Looking at Eliot like he’s a lost cause but Quentin will find him anyway, no matter how hard and how far Eliot runs and runs and always always fucking runs. 

“El,” Quentin says gently-- and it’s too _ much _ . It’s too much. But this Quentin is reaching out for the hand that’s been sitting in Eliot’s lap this whole time, tucked beneath the edge of the blanket. Quentin fishes it out carefully, and laces their fingers together, so that the bands on _ both _of their ring fingers slide past each other with a soft clink. 

Eliot just stares.

_ This should be enough _, he thinks.

It should be enough to know that in some other world, some other timeline-loop-parallel whatever this is, there’s an Eliot and a Quentin and they love each other this much. They get to have and hold, and even if death parts them tomorrow, this Quentin still at least got to earn a few more of those lines first, that Eliot loves and _ loves _and had and threw away. 

It should be _ enough _ that there’s a Quentin somewhere, anywhere-- even if it’s _ not _ the one that Eliot laid on that sign waiting for ( _ always _ waiting for)-- who lives in a clean safe, room that an Eliot has made beautiful for him, and whose recklessness can still drive an Alice up walls, because she doesn’t have to treat him like a stained-glass memory in this world. It should be enough that there’s some Quentin somewhere who’s growing _ older _every day.

It should be enough, but it’s _ not _, because no one anywhere has ever been as selfish as Eliot, and as he sits here staring at a Quentin wearing an Eliot’s ring, he can’t be grateful and he can’t be gracious and he can’t be touched or kind or worthy. The only thing he can think, at all, is--

“_ I miss you _ ,” he’s choking into Quentin’s collar bone, without knowing how he got there. “ _ Oh God, Q. I miss you. I can’t-- I can’t-- _”

It’s just sobbing after that. 

Alice waits until Eliot’s docile again before she raps on the door quietly. Even Eliot’s not foolish enough or vain enough, or ignorant of Alice’s unshowy brand of kindness enough, to imagine that she just _ happened _ to arrive after Eliot has exhausted himself down to breathing jaggedly against Quentin’s shoulder. 

She doesn’t say anything to them when she walks in, just moves quickly and quietly through setting up a circle on the floor past the end of the bed and opening a few books. She needs a mirror for part of what she’s doing, the sight of which makes Eliot want to retch again. 

Quentin’s hands haven’t stopped cradling Eliot’s lax neck and shoulders against his chest since Eliot collapsed there. 

“It’ll be okay,” Eliot finally notices he’s been whispering into the top of Eliot’s curls this whole time. “I promise, El. It’ll be okay.” 

It’s sweet of him to say. 

But.

“If you’re trying to tell me that it gets better,” Eliot begins.

Quentin cuts him off with a tearful chuckle. “No,” he insists. “No. That’s not--” 

He stops and presses his mouth to Eliot’s temple. “I’m trying to tell you,” he breathes softly against Eliot’s skin, “that you’re not _ alone _ here. _ Remember _?”

Eliot pulls back sharply, frowning. 

Before he can-- _ say _anything, Alice clears her throat and asks Eliot to come kneel inside the circle she’s made on the carpet. 

He does as ordered, still trying to assess the inscrutable look in Quentin’s red-rimmed eyes. 

As Alice nonchalantly pricks her thumb and begins dragging it in complicated shapes over the mirror beside her, Eliot swallows and says, “You never did tell me how-- how this timeline is related to mine. I’m guessing it’s-- not one of Jane’s loops?”

Alice looks up sharply from her patterns. “No,” she says quickly, without elaborating. 

Eliot nods. “And, um. Do you know who made it, then? If it wasn’t Jane?”

“No,” Alice says again, just as quick, burying her nose back in her patterns.

“_ Alice _,” Quentin says.

“_ Q _,” she scolds, pausing her work long enough to give him a long, reproving glare. 

“Whatever this-- uh, _ timeline _, is,” Quentin says, looking away from Alice, choosing his words with care, “the important thing is that all of this--” he nods around the comfortable little room, then turns back to Eliot-- “is here because-- because I would follow you anywhere, El. You don't ever need to worry about that, okay? Not for a second.”

“Oh my _ God _,” Alice huffs. 

Eliot can see out of the corner of his eye that she’s raised her hands to start the tuts to send him back, but he can’t look away from Quentin, who’s staring at him with wide eyes, like there’s something Eliot needs to _ understand _. 

Whatever Alice is doing is starting to take hold; Eliot can feel the pulling-under sensation from before again. Quentin is nodding at him, like it’s okay, like-- _ you are not alone here _ , he’d said. Echoing the words that only _ his _Quentin would have known. Like--

_ Proof of concept _.

Eliot can feel the room really spinning then, and he’s going backward. The last thing he sees before the darkness takes him back is the print that he admired earlier. This close, he can see it’s not an abstract, as he originally thought, but a still life. 

(_ Not everything has to look like something _\--)

It’s a bowl of fruit.

(_ Peaches and _\--)

Eliot looks around wildly for-- for-- 

But there’s nothing left to see.

When Eliot wakes up on day thirteen (_13 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 heartbeats_), he has a fuzzy head and vague memories of Quentin's eyes and a crater where his heart once used to be. 

He also has a Julia, standing over his bed.

He opens his mouth to tell her to go so that he can go back to hoping he'll stop hoping, but she has other plans.

“How much do you know,” she asks, mouth curling, eyes glowing, “about Orpheus and Eurydice?” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An epilogue to a prologue. 
> 
> Or: Future Eliot has a few things to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I thought this was a one-off, but it turns out it was a two-off. The Eliot who lives in the future that past Eliot got a glimpse of in chapter one apparently has some thoughts to share. 
> 
> You can think of this as the epilogue to a prologue. You can also think of it as part of my oft-repeating cycle of being sad about what canon did to these characters, then looking for hope, then grabbing that fan-manufactured hope with both hands and immediately becoming strident and defiant about it. This Eliot would like you to know that his love for Quentin isn't a tragedy, basically. And given that this is all just fiction, we get to agree that he's right-- and I'm so continuously grateful for all the wonderful folks who go on telling and believing stores that bear him out.
> 
> One more quick note-- this bit of epilogue assumes that Quentin was saved the way it happened in You're a Story (I Can Follow). For those that haven't read, there's one spoiler, which I hope will be clear from context, which is that, in that story, Eliot gave up the right to say ~certain words~ in order to get Quentin back.
> 
> Thank you so much for your overwhelmingly kind feedback on the first chapter to this story. I can never convey how grateful I am for your supportive words.

When Eliot wakes up, he can hear the hum and occasional honk of late-night traffic outside the window and feel the silky twill of the navy duvet under his hand. What he _ can’t _ hear is the scratch of Quentin’s short nails against the starched sheets, as those restless fingers twitch and jump even in sleep. What he can’t _ feel _is the ratty fleece of the hoodie that Quentin insists on wearing to bed on top of two underlayers of t-shirts (one short sleeved and one long). 

Eliot doesn’t panic.

A couple years ago, right after-- _ everything _ , he would have. Panicked. Or, well. _ Freaked the fuck out _, might be more accurate. 

He could only fall asleep back then when he was wrapped tight around Quentin, treating the beats of Quentin’s heart against his own ribcage the way that other people use imaginary sheep. It had been like that for months, even on the nights after the initial overwhelming urgency of finding each other again had receded a bit-- enough that they could spend the hours before falling asleep in each other’s arms seething about fifty-plus years’ worth of Eliot’s micro (and not-so-micro) aggressions against Quentin’s bisexuality, or (after even _more_ time had passed) finally yelling ‘_well, fucking excuse me that ‘why the fuck not’ didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that you were serious about us._’ Back in those days, if Quentin wasn’t skin-to-skin when Eliot jolted awake out of his relentless nightmares-- let alone if Quentin was gone from the bed entirely-- well. The feeling of holding Quentin in his dreams only to wake up in a world without him has taken Eliot a long time to unlearn.

Eliot _ has _ , though-- for the most part. Some people might think it’s a sign that the romance is dead, or some shit like that, that now, more often than not, Eliot ends up pushing Quentin off of his chest after a gentleman’s fifteen minutes of spooning, so that he can fall asleep without 150 pounds of triple-sweatered human furnace crushing him into the mattress. But frankly, fuck that-- and fuck all of the _ magic comes from pain _ bullshit that Eliot had relied on for so long to normalize an amount of suffering that he shouldn’t have had to bear in the first place. Eliot has _ felt _ what it means for the romance-- and everything else-- to be dead. And the fact that he can wake up without a mouthful of Quentin’s hair and take for granted that Q is _ fine _, that he’s just gotten up for a drink of water, is the diametric opposite of death. It is the most alive and in love that Eliot has ever felt.

That doesn’t mean that Eliot doesn’t still want to_ find _Quentin, wherever he’s wandered off to, of course. 

Eliot slides out from under the sheets that are cool on his side and still sweaty on Quentin’s and pads across the floor, missing the low weave of the area rug he painstakingly chose for their bedroom when his bare feet meet the chilly hardwood of the hall. Luckily, the walk is a short one-- because even though they’re magicians and former kings of Fillory for whom American currency is essentially Monopoly money, you can’t get an apartment in Dumbo with any more square footage than the cottage they once shared in the middle of nowhere for love _ or _money, and they’re not exactly lacking in the former, either. 

When Eliot reaches the front room, he’s not surprised to see that Quentin is already there, wedged into the arm of the sofa, with a glass of water on the coffee table beside him. He’s staring up at the ceiling, with the never-ending light that filters through the window illuminating his profile.

Eliot’s not surprised to see the _ true _love of his life sitting right on top of Quentin, snout slung over nylon shorts, either.

“There’s that handsome face I was missing.”

Quentin’s contemplative look cracks with the tiniest curl of his lip, as he snorts at Eliot’s words. “I’m not even going to pretend you were talking to me,” he says, without looking over to where Eliot is leaning against the doorframe.

Eliot smiles and pushes himself into the room.

“Good,” he says, “you’re not as dumb as you look, then.” 

When he settles on the couch beside them, Cozy doesn’t lift his saggy jowls from Quentin’s leg, but his mournful eyes do lift to fix on Eliot. 

(So far Julia’s the only one of their friends to figure it out, why Eliot had become so immediately and irrevocably insistent on adopting this dog in particular. She’d seen it the moment Eliot had shown her the picture on the shelter’s website, of the sweet-eyed, height-challenged senior basset mix, lying with one of his long, floppy nut-brown ears draped carelessly in his water bowl.)

Eliot reaches out automatically to smooth a hand over the velvety rolls creased into Cozy’s forehead. “Are you cold, little one? Do you need your daddies to get you some new blankets?”

Quentin heaves a put-upon sigh, even as his hand continues to pat unconsciously at Cozy’s rump. “El, we’ve talked about this. He doesn’t need any more blankets. Or puppy pillows. Or dog beds. He doesn’t use half of the ones he has now.”

Eliot strokes his hand down over one of Cozy’s long ears, as if that will block out the sound. “Hush, my darling. Don’t pay any attention to your Daddy Q. We’ll get you as many blankets as you want.”

This is a game they play, that they’ve been playing since they brought Cozy home two years ago, the way they brush and flirt against the roles that they perfected over a lifetime, once: Eliot who spoils rotten (but also issues the _ real _commands, when needed), Quentin who frets and nags. It’s something they talk about, sometimes, more frequently of late-- whether they’re ready to play those roles to not-a-dog, again. Eliot knows that Quentin feels the urge in a more primal way than he does, knows that in another life, they already had a gentle-spirited, independent-minded six-year-old by the time they were this age. But he also knows that they’re both aware that their lives are more complicated here, than when all they had was a mosaic and time. 

More precarious, too-- with the events of last week serving as a case in point.

On cue, Quentin lets his head drop farther back against the top of the couch, and says, “I couldn’t sleep. I keep thinking about last week. About-- him.”

Eliot had heard from Quentin-- and with considerably greater precision and greater-still aggravation from Alice-- what had happened last week, after Q had offered their apartment to Kady and Julia as neutral ground for a meeting between rival covens to discuss a distinctly god-flavored threat to New York hedges that Quentin can describe in a damning level of detail for a simple probability-magic professor who insists that his Saturday brunches with Julia are just for showing off pictures of Cozy and gossiping about Julia’s new boyfriend. Whatever-- someone at the meeting got trigger happy, and Eliot was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time (maybe directly in front of Cozy, and maybe on purpose). He maintains that he would have been _ fine _ to wait for someone to call in a proper healer, or even for the smoke to clear and someone who knows some proper carbon-lifeform-based healing spells to handle the situation, but. Well, if it had been-- if the situation had been _ different _, Eliot doesn’t imagine he would have responded with much more composure than Quentin did. 

Regardless of how it happened, or if it needed to, Q’s attempt at a _ literal _minor mending on Eliot (beyond the myriad metaphorical ones he performs every day) had resulted in Q being treated to a visit from from Eliot’s past, which Quentin hasn’t quite worked himself up to admitting has been bothering him ever since. 

(Eliot himself has no real memories of what his own consciousness was doing until Alice, with maximal harumphing, set things to rights-- just the vague, ten-seconds or ten-years sense of drifting in and out of awareness.) 

Eliot’s been waiting for the dam to finally break for a few nights now, because while Eliot himself, in this situation, _could _suppress the need to actually vocalize his feelings for, oh, say, _fifty years_ (to pick a number entirely at random) but is training himself to keep shit like this inside for no more than six months or so at a time, darling Q is different. Not in the fact that he’ll always _try_, in the first instance, to keep his pain inside-- his instincts may come from a different place than Eliot’s own, but they’re no different, really. But in the fact that even Q’s most ruthless efforts can only ever hold those gorgeously, overwhelmingly vivid emotions of his at bay for about six to eight days.

It doesn’t surprise Eliot, then, when Quentin tilts his head to the side and shows Eliot the second set of big, heartbroken brown eyes in this room. 

“He was just-- fuck, El, he was so_ sad _ ,” Quentin says, like it surprises him. “I mean-- I remember, when you-- when you came to find me. In the Underworld. I _ knew _ you were hurting, but-- God, Eliot, you were being so brave. But _ him _\-- he just-- I held him in my arms and he just--” Quentin’s own voice cracks when he says, “I didn’t think he’d ever stop crying.”

_ I wouldn’t have, if I’d never gotten you back _, Eliot almost says. But he doesn’t say it, because he thinks it wouldn’t be helpful. And also because Eliot isn’t the sentimentalist of this relationship; he understands that as merciless as grief is, his own survival instincts are more brutal, still, and if-- 

Cozy snuffles, and Eliot makes the fingers that have involuntarily frozen uncurl and resume petting.

\--And if Eliot had failed as miserably at leading Quentin back to the light as Eliot had guessed he would at the time (if Quentin had _ allowed _him to fail), then Eliot’s tears still would have dried eventually. Probably. If he’d managed not to drink himself to death in the meantime.

Eliot’s gut turns into a hard fist of guilt at the prospect, but fuck that. He refuses to play the _ what-would-be-worse _ game: the world where he went on Miss-Havisham-ing Quentin forever or the one where he moved on and built some other ostensibly happy life while the person who’s supposed to be his heart keeps on being _ dead _ . His life is not a tragedy. _ Their _life together is not a tragedy. It never was, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t reading the script very carefully.

“_ Baby _ ,” Eliot says, lifting his hand from Cozy’s head so that he can slide his arm around Quentin’s shoulders. “He’s _ me _. I’m right here. I’m okay now.”

Quentin nods automatically, but it hasn’t sunk in yet, Eliot knows. “Right, yeah. I know that. I just--” He sucks in a breath then lets it out in a rush of words. “I hate thinking of you so fucking-- _ hopeless _ . I keep thinking that I-- I should have just told him the truth, you know? Why the hell not? Wouldn’t it have been better to tell him what was coming, than to make him keep-- _ suffering _ like that?”

Eliot loves the fierce, _ let-me-fix-this _determination in Quentin’s eyes more than he loves almost anything. He fears it more than almost anything, too. 

“Q,” he says carefully, letting his fingers brush through Quentin’s sleep-greasy hair. “I don’t--”

He cuts himself off, gathers his words. It’s hard, remembering how it felt, being that brittle, heartbroken man who Eliot can fully believe would have shattered when confronted with this living, breathing Quentin, with the beautiful smile lines that are just starting to crease the skin beside his eyes. It’s hard because it’s _ easy _ . Every time Eliot _ sees _ Q, touches him, falls apart inside of him, there’s a lizard-brain instinct that wants to panic, because this was gone forever once, and it could be again, and maybe it was always supposed to be gone, anyway, because maybe that’s all that Eliot deserves. But Eliot’s-- he fucks it up everyday, but he’s not letting that part _ win _anymore. No more than he let his hometown or Brakebills or his fucking father win, when they told him that the most he can hope for is quaking, shocked gratitude for every unearned second where he gets to have the thing that billions of other couples on this planet and others take as their due. 

“Even pretending we lived in a world where you could _ ever _ get the drop on Alice long enough to have given away spoilers about the future in the first place,” Eliot tries again, easing just a touch of humor into his tone, “I don’t-- think it would have made the pain stop, even if you’d told me back then that I’d get you back _ tomorrow _.”

Quentin’s dear caterpillar eyebrows pull in tight, and Eliot traces a thumb over the folds between them, like he did for Cozy. 

“Why not?” Quentin asks. 

Eliot sighs and lets his thumb follow the line of Quentin’s temple to the spot where it belongs, just in front of Quentin’s ear. “For the same reason it still hurts _ you _ to know that I was in pain once _ years _ago, even though I’m sitting right here in front of you now, with not a care in the world.”

Quentin’s hand comes up to grab on to Eliot’s wrist at that, stroking his own thumb back and forth over the paper-thin skin over Eliot’s veins. 

“Well,” Eliot amends, letting his eyes sparkle as gazes down at his husband, “not a care except the fact that in your heart of hearts, you apparently think of me as an old ceramic pot in need of a new coat of paint and a minor mending.” 

Quentin rolls his eyes at Eliot’s not-particularly-convincing complaint, but even the gesture can’t take away that look on his face entirely. The one that means he wants to _ say _it, but he’s holding back out of deference to Eliot, and the price that Eliot had had to pay way back when, to bring Quentin home where he belongs. 

“You can, you know,” Eliot says, voice soft and only a little bit hoarse for the effort. “Just because I can’t say the words anymore, doesn’t mean that you can’t.”

Quentin’s eyes go even softer, if that’s possible, and he lets his nose nudge against Eliot’s own. “Eliot Waugh,” he says, close enough to Eliot’s lips that Eliot can feel each puff of air. The moment hangs suspended. Quentin’s face is too close for Eliot to be able to focus on it properly, so he closes his eyes (it doesn’t scare him now, closing his eyes, because he _ knows _ Q will still be there when he opens them) and just _ feels _\-- Q’s fingers in his hair, the spot where the smooth edge of Quentin’s wedding band touches Eliot’s skin.

“If you buy that dog another blanket,” Quentin finally says, softly, tenderly, in the vanishing space between them, “I’m going to divorce you.” 

The words make Eliot cackle, as Quentin obviously hoped they would. When he sees Eliot laughing, his whole face goes awestruck and adoring and Eliot’s hit so hard he almost loses his breath, by a memory from a few days after-- _ everything _ , once they’d finally spent enough consecutive hours huddled under covers together that Eliot could do more when Quentin was naked and on top of him than just cling and cry and roll his hips so slowly that it was like he was trying to make time stop. Eliot had come that time with a shout then a _ laugh _ , collapsing slack-jawed and slap-happy against the headboard. When Quentin had scrambled out from underneath the sheets a moment later, red-mouthed and hair a fucking mess, he’d reached out and reverently traced the upturned corner of Eliot’s lips, before smiling and breathing out, _ I missed it _ that _ way, too _.

Eliot’s heart has never been good at resisting Quentin’s smile (Quentin’s _ anything _), even back when he was trying so stupidly hard to, so he doesn’t bother with the pretense now. He pushes forward to kiss Quentin, instead, and surprises himself when he bestows his affection not on that curling mouth or the rough, tawny stubble around its edges, but higher, pressing his lips to the fine lines at the corner of Quentin’s eyes-- first one side, then the other. 

Quentin breathes in sharply against him, and presses closer-- close enough that Cozy finally lifts his head from Quentin’s knee and takes a plodding jump off the sofa to the floor, where he installs himself at Quentin’s feet. 

“Come back to bed, baby,” Eliot whispers against the shell of Quentin’s ear, as Quentin’s heart beats welcome and wonderful and _ normal _ against him. “Let me remind you what we _ really _were before.”

“_ El _,” Quentin sighs back. But when he pulls back, the look on his face is sheepish-- and recognizable.

“_ Ah _. Early morning tomorrow?” Eliot asks knowingly, playing with the hair tucked behind Quentin’s ear. The hazards of being the kept man (more by Eliot’s remotely earned Fillorian salary than by Quentin’s Brakebills pittance, but whatever) of a terribly responsible professor sort. 

Quentin winces a little but he nods. “Rain check?”

“Of course,” Eliot answers-- easily. Because if it’s not tonight, it will be tomorrow, or the next day, or the weekend. It will be one of these days and many of these days that are theirs to spend together.

But all the same--

“Counterproposal,” he offers, the hand in Quentin’s hair tugging once, soft and mischievous. “Come back to bed with me and I’ll spoon you so hard, baby, you won’t even remember your name.”

Q cracks a grin at that. “Is that an all-night offer, or will you be pushing me off in a huff after ten minutes again?”

“That depends,” Eliot says without missing a beat, fingers migrating to the cord of Quentin’s hoodie and tugging a little harder. “Ten minutes if you keep the Fleeced Monstrosity on; all night if you give daddy what he wants and go down to skin.”

As anticipated, Quentin’s eyes roll tremendously. “If you want me to sleep naked, you need to stop setting the air conditioning at fucking--”

“It’s hardly _ my _fault that the vents in this place have a kick,” Eliot interrupts.

(It _ is _ his fault, of course. He’s the one who asked Margo to hit the HVAC with a bit of her cryomancy juice. But Q doesn’t _ technically _ know that, and while getting himself slick and soaking with Quentin’s sweat is one of Eliot’s favorite pastimes in some contexts, it’s a lot more enjoyable when it’s the result of some _ effort _ on his part, rather than just the way Q’s body chemistry reacts to sleeping at any temperature north of seventy-five degrees.)

Quentin looks at him all together too knowingly, so Eliot deflects. 

“How about,” he asks in his most insinuating tone, “if I promise to hold you _ really _tight?”

Quentin _ hmms _ consideringly. “How about you do that,” he says, then adds flatly, “ _ and _I wear a t-shirt.”

“Short sleeves,” Eliot insists.

“Deal,” Quentin answers, leaning in to seal it. 

When they pull apart, Quentin’s sweet brown eyes look apologetic. “Sorry if I, um, killed the romance just now,” he says.

Eliot can’t help but kiss him again for that, a little slower. “Oh, _ Q _,” he says fondly, with one last nuzzle. 

He’s thinking of fifty years of waking up with Quentin pressed tight to Eliot’s groin, only to remember with a groan that their teenage son was asleep across the room. He’s thinking of the hellish Dumbledore beard that neither mockery nor good sense nor outright bribery had prevailed upon Quentin to shave. He’s thinking of the regularly scheduled knock-down, drag-out fights over what order the stacks of colored tiles got stored in, that only functionally ended when Eliot had lost too much strength in his hands to keep re-ordering them reds-to-blues after Quentin had stacked them blues-to-reds. He’s thinking of Quentin snorting unattractively in front the fire in the Physical Kids Cottage, and Eliot’s heart ready to fly out of his chest, because maybe he’s an abominable bitch, but he makes this fucking dweeb _ smile _. 

He’s thinking of the Eliot who lived and died at Quentin’s side, who stormed the underworld for him, and who _ still _ assumed that Quentin was just waiting to settle down with Alice Quinn, until Q finally sat him down and _ literally _read him the whole story. 

_ That _’s the truth of who they are to each other. Not only tragedy, but comedy. The dumbass, disastrous beauty of all fucking life, that a million perfect works of art could never capture.

“You didn’t ruin anything, baby. I said I’d remind you who we are. _ This _ ,” he says gently, with a little nip to Quentin’s stubbled jaw, “is fucking _ exactly _who we’ve always been.” 

Quentin’s arms go a little tighter around him at the words, and Eliot gives him a squeeze before pulling back. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go back to bed. I’ll carry the puppy.”

Quentin nods and gets to his feet, careful to step around the donut shape that Cozy has curled into on the floor. 

“I’ll be right there,” he says. “I’m just gonna rise out my glass and put it in the sink.”

Eliot leans down to pick up Cozy, the creak of his knees as he stands back up a preview of what Eliot hopes-- and isn’t scared to hope-- is coming.

He can’t see Quentin, who’s already padded off toward the kitchen, but he knows Quentin can hear him. And he knows he isn’t imagining it-- the pause in Quentin’s step, or the beloved, beautiful look that must cross his face, when Eliot adjusts Cozy in his arms and says, loud enough to carry, “Come on, sweet boy. He’s going to follow.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> P.S. All discourse in this fic regarding the appropriate number of dog blankets is cribbed shamelessly from my marriage. 
> 
> P.P.S. Quentin absolutely names his dog Cozy Dog. He has wanted to since before his voice changed. I will not hear contrary opinion. : )

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!


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